Sunday, September 5, 2004

First Person: Republican National Convention

First appeared in the Boston Globe

Days of rage, but calmer (and wiser)

When friends asked why I was heading down to the Aug. 29
demonstration in New York City in advance of the Republican National
Convention, I liked to crack wise that it was because I missed the smell of
tear gas. I suspected tear gas would work like Proust's madeleine on a boomer
like me. One whiff and I'd see old friends just as they were at 20, their long
hair held in place by bandannas, wet handkerchiefs over their faces as they
braved gas, police batons, and sometimes bullets in yet another in the unending
series of protests against the war in Vietnam.

I use the word "braved" advisedly here. To fight
in Vietnam took courage, surely, but so did devoting long years to opposing
that war. I remember John Kerry, that decorated war hero, addressing antiwar
rallies back then, and have never lost my sense of him as a man with both kinds
of courage in abundance.

But courage can coexist with political misjudgment. I was at
Columbia during the 1968 student rebellion, and remained active in Students for
a Democratic Society afterward as confrontations over the war grew more
explosive. I felt chastened when Allen Ginsberg, that warrior peacenik bard, advised,
sometime in the '70s, that my generation's susceptibility to violence only
further polarized the country and drove frightened Americans toward the right.
I took it no less seriously when I read a recent interview in New York Magazine
with Norman Mailer, who had put his body on the line, as we liked to say back
then, at least at one major demonstration, the 1967 protest at the Pentagon he
documented in "Armies of the Night" (1968).

Mailer started by saying: "When I was young, the
suggestion to be moderate was like a stink bomb to me. An orderly
demonstration? What were we, cattle?" But age, he went on, had taught him
there can be "more important things than a good outburst." Mailer's
fear was that "a combination of riots with media coverage" on the
29th would throw the election to Bush, whom he described as nothing less than a
"collection of disasters for America."

So, no, I wasn't really going to New York to score a hit of
tear gas. I, like Mailer and many others, believed violence would be a win for
Bush, and worried about provocateurs in the crowd primed to bring such clashes
on.

Confrontation was on everyone's mind. The New York Post, the
Murdoch-owned tabloid, ran incendiary headlines about aging radicals gathering
for a bust-up in New York. We were too crotchety to do damage on our own,
according to the Post, but had trained a cadre of youth to make mischief for
us.

The funny thing is how perfectly opposite to the truth this
was. Talk radio in New York in the days leading up to the demonstration was
stocked with old-timers spinning out variations on Mailer's line: Chill out,
don't let hot weather, cops, crazies, or Mayor Bloomberg's refusal to issue a
permit for a rally in Central Park make you lose control. Don't even let
questionable choices by sponsors of the march -- with regard to its slogans,
for example -- incite actions you might regret.

The main slogan of United for Peace and Justice, the group
that called the march, was "Bring The Troops Home." My friends and I
had gone hoarse shouting as much with regard to Vietnam, but most of us found
it simple-minded with regard to Iraq. We agreed the United States should never
have invaded Iraq -- there were no WMDs, no Iraqi links to 9/11. But it didn't
follow that once there the solution was just to withdraw.

On one talk show, Todd Gitlin, a '60s radical cum laude --
former chairman of Students for a Democratic Society, now a professor of
journalism at Columbia -- helped me think this through. Gitlin said that he
didn't like the slogan either, but in an imperfect world there are bound to be
imperfect rallies. Besides, the impact of the march on the 29th would depend
more on its size and discipline than on its slogans.

It must be nice, if you're a young protester in 2004, to
have elder statesmen around whose opinions you have no reason to despise. My
generation, by and large, did not. With some notable exceptions (like Mailer),
our elders had been too conditioned by the Cold War to understand that no
matter how heartily you despised Joe Stalin, the war in Vietnam was a terrible
mistake. And so we had to face the war, and the draft that sucked us into it,
on our own.

How traumatic that war was for us struck me once again when,
after the march, I went to the Whitney Museum to see footage of the 1970
protest at Kent State, where National Guardsmen shot and killed four unarmed
students. That bloody denouement contrasted with the march on the 29th, which
ended peacefully after all, with some people later moving on to Central Park to
hold hands, chant, and chat amiably with the police. I recalled there were
peaceful demonstrations in the Vietnam era, too, before the war wore on and all
hell broke lose, as at Kent State.

Confrontations about Vietnam tended to escalate in
proportion to escalations in the war itself. But it's also true that
confrontation had a logic of its own, pitting police and protesters against
each other with ever greater force. This logic was apparent on the streets of
New York in the days after the march, when hundreds of demonstrators were
arrested.

This is not a dialectic I want repeated beyond the point of
no return. Hold the tear gas, please. But if there's one thing the '60s taught
me, it's that my estimate of events is often wrong. Pessimistic as it may be to
say so, it's not so difficult to imagine a time -- especially if Bush wins this
fall -- when chanting "Bring The Troops Home" will seem like common
sense.